


On the steps of the Agora

by vespirus



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Greek philosophers as substitutes for father figures, Internal Monologue, Introspection, Philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 12:16:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15412713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vespirus/pseuds/vespirus
Summary: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows."- Socrates, "The Apology" by Plato





	On the steps of the Agora

**Author's Note:**

> kind of rambley but thats life baby! ive been taking an ethics course this summer and it really just got me #thinkin.

You’re laying in bed. Music is playing through your speakers and you’re listening with half an ear while you mull over things. It seems you’re always roiled by something – but it’s not as if you have much else to do other than lay in bed and eat your tail all day and night.

You’ve read a lot of philosophy. Your friends would back this up, saying you’re absolutely insufferable about it too. And while yes, you know you talk like a jackass who’s writing his postgraduate thesis, you have trouble reading articles written like that. You still  _ read _ them, it just takes you a lot longer than they might think it did. But that’s beside the point.

So you’re big into philosophy. You love reading about it, you love talking about it, you just love it. It’s so fucking interesting. It sucks that the only one who really want to talk to you about it is the brain-clone you made of yourself, so it just ends up circling around into the same old tired arguments. And those aren’t productive. It’s like living in the opposite of a epistemic bubble. They can’t be called fundamentally moral disagreements when when it comes to  _ him _ you can’t find it in you to be open to other viewpoints. Sauer and Alfano disagreed if that was imperative to a true argument but… you digress.

Your friends seem to think philosophy is all about finding the meaning of life and a load of pretentious bullshit. Which, fair. It is. But it’s more than that. To you, at least. Asking questions, finding answers, trying to sort true from false and objective from subjective. There’s so much to be applied to life as well, it’s not all just hot air from a bunch of reclining Greeks and Victorians pondering what it might be like if they were poor or were held responsible for their actions.

It’s fascinating. There is a stumbling block for you, though. Once you’re able to fight your way through dense academic prose, research all the unknown references back to their original sources, and even hack through archival paywalls of peer-reviewed articles, there still is one place you seem to fall flat on understanding. Society.

So much of it is based within a society, understanding it, how to move in it, what defines it, the ideal form of it, how it affects us, and so on. Which, yeah. It’s the most simple way of understanding humanity. Humans are pack animals, social creatures, meant to be within groups not alone. Exile was tantamount to death for most human societies. If they could not live as a group, they could not live. Cooperation and interaction are the cornerstones of understanding someone’s character and what philosophy and ethical principles truly  _ mean  _ when put into practice. But – 

And there’s a ping on your laptop. A pesterchum notification, from Jake. You stare at your far away computer screen from your bed lazily, unable to bring yourself to move. He was probably replying to the litany of messages you left for him while he was out adventuring. You had gotten up earlier today and tired of fiddling with Squarewave’s circuits, and no one was online so you’d ended up sending all of them a couple paragraphs of garbage to return to.

Not to put too fine of a point on this needle being used to sew out a tapestry of depressing isolation bordering on the environment to create a feral child but…

It’s just you here.

So how the fuck are you supposed to be able to speak on, let alone truly comprehend the concepts that exist within a human society?

It might be said (by who? You have no one to talk to about this. Maybe  _ him _ , but he’s probably only more frustrated by the incongruency of your life/lives than you, considering his… situation.) that this a cultural relativist approach and the criticisms of that viewpoint being leveled against you to try and comfort you that you could understand, if you really wanted to, if you really tried. Which okay, yes, the criticisms of cultural relativism make sense.

But there’s something in there you still believe (you might find that in another theory, like constructivism, but it’s next to impossible for you to find references for that theory not referring to educational services and how they should be constructed) and it grips you hard with hot black claws like the shadows here in the summer sun. Reminding you that you’ll never  _ really _ know.

The same way you’ll never really understand Jane. Roxy and Jake too, but you can imagine. Jane you have no real touchstone for – only media content you’ve consumed over the years, which may as well be about. And you reach for a metaphor, but there’s not even one that captures the true feeling of Jane being such a xeno to you. And while you can practice the virtue of xenia with her you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to really know what it’s like for her.

Plato was never your favorite philosopher. The chumhandle was more an in-joke to yourself, a deprecating poke at your situation, that you’ve almost grown sick of seeing. His work was still interesting, though. The timeline from his Socratic works to his more original concepts is something you tracked and that interested you but made you feel uneasy in yourself at the same time. You sometimes wonder if to an outsider you’d seem to have fallen into the same trap as him. The admiration, reverence, mourning, for someone he had known briefly as a younger man and then was killed, changing the course of Plato’s life in the aftermath.What if he had been a poet, or whatever the hell he was planning to be? Would anyone remember him?

Maybe. But it was fucking depressing to read the works of a man seemingly mourning and casting into immortality the love of a teacher, a mentor, and of his family. The “recurrent father-son themes” are a little much for you. The comparison between Plato and yourself felt a little too heavy-handed at times. It disquieted you to compare your brother to a father, the man who you barely know and maybe never even met compared to a beloved mentor.

The trial and death of a public figure for broadcasted charges but truly being carried out because of an unspoken association with  _ the enemy _ is too much of a repeat performance for you, though. You read  _ Apology _ and it took Roxy sobering up for a day to coax you out of your self-dug well.

So, Plato isn’t your favorite. But whatever. There’s plenty more philosophy to read. Even if it’s all contradictory and pulls you down sometimes, maybe makes you think a little too hard about what a truly bad person you are. “Better Socrates dissatisfied, than a fool satisfied,” or whatever the fuck. As if you’re any Socrates, as if you’re not a fool already.


End file.
